Table Of ContentPelican Books zr" \
The Peasants of North Vietnam \
\ \
Girard Chaliand, history teacher and specialist
in underdeveloped countries, was bom in Brussels
in 1934, although he is now a French citizen. He '
studied at the National School of Oriental
Languages in Paris. Formerly editor and assistant
manager of the Algerian weekly Revolution
Africaine (1963), Girard Chaliand is the author of
L?Algeria est-all'a sodaliste ? (1964) and Lutte armie '
an Afriqua (1967; Armed Struggle in Africa, 1969).-
In October-November 1967 he made a study of '
several villages in North Vietnam, and on his ■
return published a report in the Monde
Diplomatique. Between the years 1952-62 and r
1966-9 he travelled' extensively in Africa, Latin
America, Middle-east and South-east Asia. J
Gerard Chaliand
The Peasants of
North Vietnam
With a preface by Philippe Devillers
Translated by Peter Wiles
Penguin Books
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Inc., 7x10 Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Les Paysans du nord-vietnam et la guerre first published by F. Maspero 1968
This translation first published in Pelican Books 1969
Copyright© Librairie Francois Maspero, 1968
Translation copyright © Penguin Books Ltd, 1969
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Hazell, Watson & Viney, Aylesbury, Bucks.
Set in Monotype Plantin
This book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without
the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
Contents
Preface by Philippe Detrillers 7
Author’s Preface 13
Introduction 16
General 37
The Structure of Vietnam 38
Educational Problems 47
Health Problems 50
The Origins of Escalation 52
Escalation 56
State and Village 58
The Role of Women 60
Democratization at the Bottom 61
The Red River Delta 65
1. The Province of Hung Yen 71
The Province of Hung Yen 88
The Village of Quoc Tri 90
Education 102
' The Work of an Administrative Committee 118
The Organization of a Co-operative 122
A District Hospital 128
Trading 132
Personal Statements 137
2. The Province of Thai Birth 163
Village Caches 170
A Village Medical Unit 172
The Co-operative at Tan Phong 174
The Slaughter of Dai Lai 180
6 Contents
3. The Province of Ha Tay 199
The Commune of Hoa Xa 200
A Handicrafts Co-operative 204
A Bombed Village 207
A Nursery School 211
Personal Statements 215
4. The Province of Nin Binh 229
The Hamlet of Huong Dao 236
The Village of Luu Phuong 239
Conclusion 241
The Role of Ideology 241
Select Bibliography 243
Maps 246-7
Preface
by Philippe Devillers
What can explain the extraordinary resilience with which
Vietnam is countering the' pressure of the American war
machine? How has this nation of thirty-two million men,
women and children, poor and more or less unindustrialized,
managed to survive the torrent of fire and steel to which it has
been subjected for nearly eight years by the most formidable
military apparatus the world has ever known? This is the
question which Gerard Chaliand set out to answer during a
visit to Vietnam in the autumn of 1967 - a visit largely devoted
to a study of the rural communities.
The material which he brought back, and which he has
deliberately chosen to publish with a bare minimum of editing,
throws a remarkably revealing light on the Vietnamese people’s
capacity for resistance. It shows how the individual on the spot
is standing up to the war - what he thinks about it, what
impact it has had on him, and what keeps him going. His
material and cultural background is described too.
To my mind, the most significant point to emerge from this
set of documents is the remarkable ‘deep-rootedness’ of the
men and women ofthe Vietnamese countryside and the manner
in which the American aggression can be seen to relate to them
in time and space. That aggression takes on its full historical
dimension in these interviews - a dimension which it will
probably retain, whatever else may happen. In the two-
thousand-year-old struggle of the Vietnamese people, it stands
in line with the great Chinese, Mongol and French invasions,
all of which were smashed in the end, though sometimes at a
terrible price. Whoever the invader may have been at a par-
ticular time, it has been one long, continuous fight for national
independence and freedom from oppression. Today, great
8 The Peasants of North Vietnam
heroes of the past who won victories over mighty foes - Le
Loi and Nguyen Trai, for example - are called to mind, not
only to inspire confidence and determination, hut to fill every-
one with the resolve to match the achievements of earlier times.
To remain free, to survive as a free people, to defend the
nation’s ancient and modem heritage: these are the basic
objectives. How puny, in comparison, seem the ideological
pretexts with which the Anglo-Saxons seek to slander the
victims of their expansionism.
Two of the comments reported by Gerard Chaliand are very
significant in this respect. One peasant says : ‘The Americans
are grabbing Vietnam’s resources in the South and destroying
everything we have built in the North. They’re doing it
because they want to be. masters of the world. They must be
driven out at all costs.’ And another, a Catholic living in the
district of Phat Diem: ‘The Americans are cruel, very cruel.
They are out to conquer our country so that they can rule it in
their own way. Already they are in the South, and beyond any
doubt they mean to invade us from the skies. Sooner or later
they will be beaten, though.’ Has anyone ever conveyed the
essence of a major conflict in so few and such simple words ?
Another equally fundamental point emerges from these
pages. The Pentagon wrongly imagined that escalation would
bring chaos to North Vietnam; instead,, exposure to the furnace
has considerably strengthened the nation’s institutions. The
‘patriotic war’ has completed the task of uniting the population
in a common effort. It has finally bridged the gap between the
generations, between the social classes, between the main ethnic
group and the minorities, between the Party organizations and
the workers, whatever their background, their religious faith
or their political loyalties. Events have brought the Vietnamese
people to a new level of consciousness in which nationalism,
democracy and socialism merge and interact to an even greater
degree than before.
In North Vietnam, government and Party have succeeded -
Preface by Philippe Devillers 9
more quickly, more sincerely and more effectively, it would
seem, than in any other socialist country - in identifying
Marxism with the national heritage. The political successes
which they have reaped since they placed national indepen-
dence in the forefront of their aims are ample testimony to the
truth of this statement. A nation is the product of a long
process of material, intellectual and spiritual accumulation. It
is the end-product of numberless individual and collective
contributions, of a sustained experience of human beings and
environment, of techniques painstakingly evolved and discern-
ingly applied. In short, it is the holder of a legacy which each
new generation must hand on to the next, after imprinting it
with their own labours. This is especially true of a rural com-
munity, where man is living at once in conflict and in harmony
with nature.
Why throw away the advantages of this legacy merely to
satisfy the rules of a narrow, inflexible dogmatism? By restor-
ing the concept of ‘the people, makers of history’ to its original
place of prominence, socialism is able to take over all that is
worth preserving in the country’s heritage, and to ensure the
continuity of the popular and national effort.
Readiness to inherit and reinvigorate the existing collective
institutions of the nation - in particular, the rural communities
- has made it possible for socialism to turn the country into a
genuine ‘confederation of villages’, which even the most mod-
em methods of warfare have been powerless to dismember. To
the astonishment of those who did not know Vietnam, these
thousands of living cells - enjoying a broad measure of auto-
nomy and drawing their essential nourishment from the land
and water - have held firm in spite of the terrorism to which
they have been subjected from the air. Far from disintegrating,
they have derived a new Vitality from the change in the pat-
terns of production and from the increasing democratization.
One can only hope that this new vitality will survive the war
and any future return to bureaucratic Communism. Certainly
